Sleeps With the Fishes

It was a dream match, one of Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD Records’ most inspired couplings: Pieter Nooten, who’d just left the Dutch goth/darkwave outfit Clan Of Xymox, after they’d recorded two albums for 4AD, and Canadian guitarist Michael Brook, who’d been working among the Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, Harold Budd ambient music circle, but who also had experience with songs, via his work with Mary Margaret O’Hara. Sleeps With The Fishes transcends expectations, though, a rare moment where collaboration creates something even more potent and evocative than hinted by its constituent parts. It has a dank, elegiac air which, nevertheless, isn’t ‘gothic’; nor is it ambient wallpaper. Shifting between liminal songs, blurred things with Nooten’s vocal murmur set against stripped-back programming and hovering banks of tone, and tender ambient interludes, it’s restrained, but its emotional depth catches you looking. Nooten and Brook access a similar, core tonality of resigned melancholy that doesn’t have too many peers: in the mid to late eighties, maybe only Breathless, Heavenly Bodies and A.C. Marias were doing something similar. Simple sublimity.